The Velvet Underground
White Light/White Heat

THE REVIEW

The past and future of rock. The first two albums by The Velvet Underground encompass everything that had been written up to 1967, but more importantly, much of what WOULD be written in the years to come. Never has a band had such enormous influence and never has a band been so unique, essential, outside any genre yet incredibly important.

White Light/White Heat is certainly less communicative than Velvet Underground and Nico, but in its six episodes, it reaches heights probably unmatched in the history of last century's music. The title track is a rotten, ambiguous, stripped-down blues, crying out painfully yet another story of drugs. The gift is rap, psychedelia, pure noise condensed into a hallucinated tale of Lou Reed's sadomasochistic dream. Lady Godiva's Operation and Here She Comes Now are melodic interludes (so to speak) that do not break the rhythm of that hallucinatory and nihilistic trip that is White Light/White Heat, as they sound so distorted and emaciated.

For I Heard Her Call My Name, the same can be said as for the title track: the VU take rock 'n' roll and give it electroshock, they disorder it, devastate it, grind it down. Sister Ray, finally, is the pinnacle of the album and perhaps the entire career of the VU: 17 minutes of hypnotic ride, with a shamanic crescendo and a climax of noise that disturbs and draws in, speaking the language of the decadent and ambiguous New York of which The Velvet Underground was the most beautiful tale.

Forgive the daring statement, but had they sold millions of records instead of a few thousand, they would decidedly be, more than The Beatles, the no-holds-barred group of rock, because they said everything and wrote everything, and they did it in such a unique way that there are no possible comparisons with any other band.